Edvard Benes

Edvard Benes (17 May 1884-3 September 1948) was Prime Minister of Czechoslovakia from 26 September 1921 to 7 October 1922, succeeding Jan Cerny and preceding Antonin Svehla. and President from 18 December 1935 to 5 October 1938, succeeding Tomas Garrigue Masaryk and preceding Emil Hacha and again from 2 April 1945 to 7 June 1948, succeeding Hacha and preceding Klement Gottwald.

Biography
Edvard Benes was born in Kozlany, Bohemia, Austria-Hungary in 1884, and he was educated in Prague and at the Sorbonne before becoming an economics lecturer at Prague University before World War I. In 1914, he fled from Prague to Paris, where he helped Tomas Garrigue Masaryk to form the Czechoslovak National Council. He became the leader of the Czech National Socialist Party, and he served as the Czech delegate at the Paris Peace Conference. He served as Foreign Minister from 1918 to 1935, ensuring that King Charles I of Austria was not restored to the Hungarian throne and that Czechoslovakia was allied with France. He served as Prime Minister from 1921 to 1922, and he succeeded Masaryk after his resignation. He was both a pragmatist and a nationalist, and he accepted Slovakian demands for recognition of their distinctiveness and was even prepared to surrender the Sudetenland in return for peace with Nazi Germany. He resigned in solidarity wiuth the entire cabinet over the Munich Agreement, and he went into exile in the United States, where he worked as a teacher during World War II. He became the head of the Czechoslovak government-in-exile in 1939, leading it from both Paris and London. He hade no ideological prejudices against Stalin, and he believed that the USSR sould become more capitalist after the war, while the West would become more socialist. He accepted the growing power of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia under Klement Gottwald in his postwar government, and he failed to mobilize opposition against a communist takeover in February 1948. He stayed on as president until 6 May 1948, and he died in Sezimovo Usti in September at the age of 64.